Musings: Haunted by timeless joy on every Halloween
This reader has worn his skeleton T-shirt on countless Halloweens Credit: Kathleen Conway
Six decades after I dressed up as Count Dracula and rang my neighbors’ doorbells in search of candy corn, I still look forward to Halloween each October.
I’m sure I have lots of company. No matter how old we are, Halloween invites us to be young again — to carve funny faces on pumpkins, watch “Night of the Living Dead” for the umpteenth time, and put on that goofy skeleton T-shirt to entertain friends. It’s a day off from seriousness, just the thing for folks with furrowed brows.
Of course, not everyone is wild about Halloween, especially given its tilt toward commercialism. Haunted houses, theme parks, ghost tours, pumpkin patches, nighttime hayrides, costume balls, fright fests, humongous yard inflatables: They’re all part of the Long Island landscape these autumn days. Selling “scary” has never been so profitable.
“So much pricey stuff for a day that used to be just for kids,” says one of my Massapequa neighbors. She recalls simpler times, when people were content to plop a pumpkin on their stoop and tape a cardboard black cat to their front window.
But the way I see it, even if Halloween has become big business, people should be able to spend their money on whatever pleases them. I’m not a hardcore Halloween reveler, but I have no problem with those who celebrate by howling at the moon (metaphorically or otherwise). If somebody’s idea of a good time is navigating a corn maze at midnight or being serenaded by screaming zombies at a theme park, well, why not?
Still, let’s remember that Halloween wouldn’t be Halloween without kids, including youngsters hitting the trick-or-treat trail for the first time. I’m glad that most adults I know are sensible enough to decorate their property with smiling pumpkins, friendly ghosts and cute scarecrows — creatures likely to tickle the fancy of 7-year-olds making the rounds.
As for those whose front lawns still reflect a taste for the ghoulish, maybe they’ll see the light and replace their eerie tombstones and life-size Freddy Kruegers with a Charlie Brown and Great Pumpkin blowup. A long shot maybe, but strange things sometimes happen on Halloween.
— Rich Conway, Massapequa
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